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Topic: Nvidia GTX 780 - What do you think? (Read 1481 times)

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« on: May 27, 2013, 03:10:41 PM »

Nvidia is certainly carving an interesting niche for itself that transcends beyond simply supplying graphics cards. Today, the company not only announced its latest graphics card, the GeForce GTX 780, but also a pleasant new feature for its software optimization service, the GeForce Experience: ShadowPlay, a new gameplay recording tool that promises higher efficiency than FRAPS.

First, let's tackle the hardware. The GeForce GTX 780 has a Kepler GPU with 2,304 cores and 3GB of GDDR5 memory, which the company indicates is roughly 50% more powerful than its predecessor. Nvidia also promises seamless graphics on Call of Duty: Ghosts, Watch Dogs and Battlefield 4, although that, understandably, remains to be seen.

But perhaps what is most interesting about the graphics card is its price: Starting at $649, it's the comparable, low cost option for those who experienced involuntary eye-bulging from the $999 price tag of the ultra-high performance GeForce GTX Titan.

While the new graphics card is a great (relatively) cost-effective maneuver for the high-end graphics card market, Nvidia's secret trump card may lie in the features that it is producing in its software, the GeForce Experience. In addition to optimizing graphics settings based on the rig and providing wireless streaming to Nvidia's foray into the handheld market, Project Shield, the GeForce Experience will also include automagic recording system ShadowPlay.

Customized via the GeForce Experience platform, SlashGear reports that ShadowPlay utilizes the H.264 video encoder built within the Kepler GPU to create an efficient and lag-free recording program with a minimal power draw that "more than takes on FRAPS, it out-does it." No public demos of the feature have occurred yet, but Nvidia ensures that recording even high-end games won't affect framerate.

The GeForce GTX 780 is shipping now to available partners worldwide, but those more interested in ShadowPlay will have to sit tight — the feature will come within an update to the GeForce Experience sometime later this summer.